- your character speaks its refusals: `VocalUISounds.dbc` gets an adapter, `sound::vocal` transcribes `0x4580f0`'s per-race table and `0x458250`'s play cycle — four plays of one line arm the annoyed variations, and the bus cap of one keeps the annoyed and ordinary lines from playing at once; a displayed message now carries its catalog RECORD, so its sound comes off the same row (tag 0x44 plays the named cue, anything else speaks the line), and 36 of the keys benilla raises have a voice — cast failures, inventory refusals, the quest/auction/petition lines, taxi, bank, stable, mail, the talent wipe; `EnableErrorSpeech` joins the CVars at the registrar's own default and the Audio page grows 1.12's fourth Sound checkbox with the dependency ours was missing (the master greys Ambience AND Error Speech, not Music); seven of the twelve taxi refusals turn out to be the YELLOW info line, not the red one they all took - at equal (strata, level) the hit sweep takes the EARLIER-linked frame: `0x764aa0` inserts with a strict `ja`, so equal keys are appended, and `0x7660d0` sweeps each bucket from index 0 upward — the reverse of the reverse-draw-order walk we had, so draw order is unchanged and only the hit sweep reorders within a plane; the wheel becomes its own index, and the five full-area wheel-catcher Buttons (Craft, QuestLog, Skill, TradeSkill, Trainer) are deleted, since under the true tie law each would have swallowed its whole window's clicks — a bug the Skill window's own comment had already recorded once - one rasterizer settle for the whole ground-decal family, and it is the measured one: the shipped client constructs `CGxDeviceD3d`, so the OpenGL arm holding the −4.0 slope factor is never executed (factor 0 on 2485 of 2485 captured `glPolygonOffset` calls), and every number derived from it was 256× too small; the reference groups the blob shadow with the selection RING and the footprints on their own at 10×, the reverse of ours — but ours is reversed-Z float where the bake residual is millimetre-scale and constant with distance, so `DECAL_RASTER` collapses to one value (32768: the ring and the reticle had been under their own conflict at 8192 and simply never walked on a slope) Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Important
Issues and pull requests are closed here. benilla is a solo project developed in a private tree; this repo is its export, published as squashed snapshots, so a PR here has nothing to land on. The best way to contribute is to join the Discord and report the bugs you find. Questions and ideas are welcome in the same place.
benilla speaks the original 1.12.1 protocol, so it connects to any server the real client could, and reads its game data at runtime from your own 1.12.1 install. Every file format and the network protocol are implemented from scratch, with no original client code, no third-party WoW crates, and no bundled game assets.
What works
- Formats: readers for the full asset stack (MPQ patch chain, BLP, DBC, ADT/WDT/WDL, M2, WMO), wired into Bevy as an asset source.
- World: streamed terrain out to the horizon, portal-culled WMOs with interior lighting, doodads and ground clutter, swimmable liquids, sky and weather, and the client's own day/night lighting, fog and gamma passes.
- Models: GPU-skinned M2s with the full animation controller, a near feature-complete particle system, ribbons, and animated gameobjects from doors to lifts.
- Characters: customization end to end, the armor texture composite, weapons with sheathing and enchant glows, shapeshift forms, stealth and mounts.
- Movement: a WoW-feel controller, networked movement in both directions, the server-granted modes from slow fall to roots, a follow camera with collision, boats, zeppelins and taxi flights.
- Networking: SRP6 auth through world-session crypto, the object mirror into the ECS, and live wire coverage from movement and chat through spells, party, quests, mail, trade, vendors, bank, loot, the auction house and PvP honor.
- UI: a from-scratch FrameXML + Lua engine driving the built-in interface, from the login and
character screens through the full HUD, the classic windows (guild, macros and key bindings
included), chat, nameplates, floating combat text and tooltips; third-party addons load from
a
benilla-config/AddOns/folder beside the executable (partial: AtlasLoot and Bagnon run, see below). - Combat: melee on the faithful swing law, ranged and Auto Shot, casting with GCD and cooldowns, combo points, crowd control that really holds you, and the spell visual pipeline.
- Audio: music, ambience and SFX under the client's own selection and crossfade rules, with interior and underwater transitions and zone reverb.
Where it's going
benilla is done when a 1.12.1 player can do everything here that they could in the original client, it looks and feels the same, and it runs from a download on Windows, Linux and macOS. No dates; the order is what is likely, not a promise.
- Battlegrounds and meeting stones, then the long tail of small features that separates a working client from a finished one.
- Addons, options and performance, ongoing.
- The no-brainer fixes from VanillaFixes, SuperWoW and the like.
- Playable downloads for Windows, Linux and macOS. Linux first.
Not planned: other expansions or client versions, Warden (anticheat).
Running it
You need a 1.12.1 (build 5875) client install for game data, a vanilla server to connect to, and stable Rust. Any 1.12.1 core works; vmangos is what development runs against, and cMaNGOS and the rest speak the same protocol.
WOW_DATA=/path/to/WoW/Data cargo run --release -p benilla
The server defaults to localhost:3724, the stock realmd auth port. Point WOW_HOST
at any IP or hostname, appending the auth port if yours is remapped
(WOW_HOST=play.example.com:5000). Credentials go in at the login screen, or set WOW_USER /
WOW_PASS to skip it.
Early inspiration and file format guidance came from the wowemulation-dev community, and warcraft-rs in particular.
benilla is an independent fan project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Blizzard Entertainment.
It ships no Blizzard content — no art, models, sounds, maps, MPQ contents or FrameXML; you
provide your own legally obtained 1.12.1 client. The interface code under
crates/benilla-app/assets/ui/ is ours, written to the client's own layout and API names so that
the windows look right and 1.12.1 addons find the names they expect.
World of Warcraft is a trademark of Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. Our own code is licensed under MIT or Apache 2.0, at your option.